Drone operators' blunders ripped

Sunday

May 30, 2010 at 12:01 AMMay 30, 2010 at 11:24 AM

KABUL - The U.S. military released a scathing report yesterday on the deaths of 23 Afghan civilians, saying that "inaccurate and unprofessional" reporting by a team of Predator drone operators helped lead to an inadvertent airstrike this year on a group of innocent men, women and children.

KABUL — The U.S. military released a scathing report yesterday on the deaths of 23 Afghan civilians, saying that “inaccurate and unprofessional” reporting by a team of Predator drone operators helped lead to an inadvertent airstrike this year on a group of innocent men, women and children.

The report said that four American officers, including a brigade and battalion commander, had been reprimanded, and that two junior officers had also been disciplined. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who apologized to President Hamid Karzai after the attack, announced a series of training measures intended to reduce the chances of similar events.

The episode, in which three vehicles were attacked and destroyed in February, illustrated the extraordinary sensitivity to the inadvertent killing of noncombatants by NATO forces. Since taking command last June, McChrystal has made the protection of Afghan civilians a priority and he has sharply restricted the use of airstrikes.

The civilian deaths also highlighted the hazards in relying on remotely piloted aircraft to track suspected insurgents. In this case, as in many others in which drones are employed by the military, the people steering and spotting the targets sat at a console at Creech Air Force Base, Nev.

The attack occurred on the morning of Feb. 21, near the village of Shahidi Hassas in Oruzgan province, a Taliban-dominated area in southern Afghanistan. An American Special Operations team was tracking a group of insurgents when a pickup and two sport-utility vehicles moving through the area began heading in their direction.

The Predator operator reported seeing only military-age males in the truck, the report said. The ground commander concurred, the report said, and the Special Operations team asked for an airstrike. An OH-58D Kiowa helicopter fired Hellfire missiles and rockets, destroying the vehicles and killing 23 civilians. Twelve others were wounded.

The report, signed by Maj. Gen. Timothy P. McHale, found that the Predator operators in Nevada, as well as the ground commander in the area, made several grave errors that led to the airstrikes.

The “tragic loss of life,” McHale found, was compounded by the failure of the ground commander and others to report in a timely manner that they might have killed civilians.

“The strike occurred because the ground force commander lacked a clear understanding of who was in the vehicles, the location, direction of travel, and the likely course of action of the vehicles,” McHale wrote.

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